PALMDALE - A military aircraft design that is well past 40 years old could go back into production - and right here in the Valley. Reincarnation of Lockheed's venerable U-2 spy plane is possible, officials say.
PALMDALE - A military aircraft design that is well past 40 years old could go back into production - and right here in the Valley. Reincarnation of Lockheed's venerable U-2 spy plane is possible, officials say.
ROSAMOND - A 10 1/2-acre site once used for unauthorized smelting and metals recovery has been certified as safe for business uses.
March 18
LITTLEROCK - Littlerock officials and union workers have attacked the proposed charter school at First Missionary Baptist Church in Littlerock, calling the school a "back-door voucher" and a threat to public school employees. The concerns were voiced during Thursday's Littlerock Town Council meeting and a special charter school meeting held in late February.
March 19
LOS ANGELES - A Mojave Desert freeway overpass cracked, a tourist town was shut down and bottles tumbled from store shelves as an aftershock to the 1992 Landers earthquake rattled a wide area of Southern California early Tuesday. No serious damage or injuries were reported, but the temblor jangled nerves and raised a gauzy cloud of dust over sparsely populated desert towns.
QUARTZ HILL - Authorities were searching for a lone gunman in connection with a successful robbery of Downey Savings & Loan Tuesday. It was the second robbery of a Quartz Hill bank in five days.
PALMDALE - Motorists in the Antelope Valley are noticing an increase in gasoline prices compared to this time last year. Climbing prices are due to a decrease in refinery capacity in Southern California, according to industry officials.
March 20
GORMAN - In going ahead with plans for expansion, National Cement Co. will end a 10-year practice of burning hazardous wastes at its plant near Gorman, company president Don Unmacht announced.
VAN NUYS - An Antelope Valley woman was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for her part in an arson insurance scam that went awry at her Littlerock home, ending in the death of her policeman husband. Joy Hooker, 52, had been charged, along with her stepson, with planning a blaze April 19, 1993, in which retired LAPD officer Thomas Warren Hooker, 58, died.
Hard on the heels of last year's victory to form a separate Antelope Valley air quality district, some local leaders want to take community control to a higher level - formation of a high desert county.
March 21
PALMDALE - Firefighters at Station 37 of the Los Angeles County Fire Department stay on their toes. The station on Ninth Street East in Palmdale was recently named the busiest station in Los Angeles County for 1996.
Station 37/131 ranked second in total responses, responding to more than 11,000 calls in 1996.
LANCASTER - A Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy remained hospitalized Thursday after a two-car traffic collision at the intersection of 10th Street West and Avenue I.
PEARBLOSSOM - Police chased a stolen motor home Thursday from suburban Los Angeles into the Mojave Desert, where it bounced around on dirt roads until getting stuck in a drainage ditch. Two men and two teens were arrested, and several law enforcement radio cars were temporarily put out of commission during the five-hour pursuit.
March 22
LANCASTER - Assemblyman George Runner, R-Lancaster, said Friday he wants to reinvent government and announced a proposal that could lead to redrawing the 100-year-old boundaries of Los Angeles County. Assembly Bill 303 would create a local agency called the Los Angeles County Revision Authority to evaluate the county's finances and how well it delivers services.
PALMDALE - Space shuttle prototype Enterprise might return to its Antelope Valley birthplace if a report by United Space Alliance and NASA can justify its move here to remove space-worthy parts and replenish spare-part supplies.
LANCASTER - A Lancaster man, reportedly on parole for felony sex offenses, was arrested Wednesday afternoon as he loitered near Antelope Valley College's Child Development Center, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies reported.
March 23
LOS ANGELES - The official prognosis is that Margaret Elizabeth Broderick will spend the next 16 years and six months behind bars for running a bogus Freemanstyle check scam. But the selfnamed "lien queen" said in an interview from the downtown federal jail that she will be free soon.
March 25
LANCASTER - A Lancaster woman pleaded not guilty Monday to murder in the fire-related death of her mentally retarded son in February. Catherine "Paula" Fimbres rejected an offer by prosecutors in which Fimbres would forego trial and spend six years in prison, said Deputy District Attorney Kelly Cromer.
A sheriff's deputy who reportedly shot at several taggers after they threatened him with rocks and baseball bats last year has been relieved of duty pending the outcome of a grand jury investigation into the shooting.
March 26
RED ROCK CANYON - If not for the unstoppable path of progress, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History wouldn't have evidence that a far-distant cousin of the elephant roamed these parts 9 million years ago.
The evidence from prehistory is an oddly shaped elephant tusk unearthed during preparation for widening a 4.2-mile stretch of the Antelope Valley Freeway north of Red Rock Canyon State Park.
LANCASTER - A third Superior Court judge will be assigned to Lancaster to handle the influx of cases created by the state's "threestrikes" law, a promise hinging on construction of a new courtroom, officials said this week.
LOS ANGELES - A motion by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich to kill a planned Antelope Valley compost plant was itself killed Tuesday when three other Los Angeles County supervisors declined to second it.
PALMDALE - Ritter Ranch Co., developer of the failed Ritter Ranch project, has filed bankruptcy, Los Angeles County court records show.
March 27
TULSA - Attorneys filed a civil lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of the widow of a Lancaster man who died last year during a confrontation with security personnel in a Tulsa nightclub The complaint for unspecified damages seeks to compensate the widow and four young daughters of Robert Mark D'Errico, who died Sept. 24.
March 28
LANCASTER - The ninemember board of directors of the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds voted 7-0 Thursday to relocate the 59year-old facility to a new West Avenue H site owned by the city's Redevelopment Agency.
LANCASTER - The number of Superior Court jury trials based on felony cases filed in the Antelope Valley remained above 80 for a second consecutive year, a pace due to the 1994 "three-strikes" law.
March 29
LOS ANGELES - The head of the county's Department of Children and Family Services says he will address complaints of Lancaster workers with a plan to increase employment and computerize mounds of repetitive paperwork.
LANCASTER - The City Council voted unanimously to become one of the two government entities needed to create the Los Angeles County Revision Authority proposed by Assemblyman George Runner.
March 30
PALMDALE - With anywhere from $7 million to $17 million already spent on plans for a new Antelope Valley courthouse, one might expect more than a barren patch of land where the Los Angeles County complex is supposed to be built. But that's about as far as the county has come since agreeing a decade ago that a new courthouse must be built to handle a soaring caseload and alleviate courtroom overcrowding that plagued the Valley since the 1980s.
